After solving the above two issues, the laptop has a shiny new Arch Linux Operating System that seems to be fully functional. (Using it now to write these notes).

So here are the install instructions from the official Arch Linux "Installation Guide", I'll try and designate or edit out thesteps that we can skip and add in a few notes that will help [any of us] with the next Arch Linux install. (From: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/installation_guide )=================================================== Arch Linux should run on any x86_64-compatible machine with a minimum of 512 MB RAM. A basic installation with all packages from the base group should take less than 800 MB of disk space. As the installation process needs to retrieve packages from a remote repository, a working internet connection is required.

(We used a test fdisk partition list to calculate how much to leave at the end for swap - we just set swap at the first of the drive ad the other partitio at the end and used the size of the last partition to recreate the first one - after deleting the partitions and starting over, we knew what size the / partition should be in order to leave 4G at the end.)

Format the partitions

Once the partitions have been created, each must be formatted with an appropriate file system. For example, to format the root partition on /dev/sda1 with ext4, run:

Installation

Select the mirrors

Packages to be installed must be downloaded from mirror servers, which are defined in/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist. On the live system, all mirrors are enabled, and sorted by their synchronization status and speed at the time the installation image was created.

The higher a mirror is placed in the list, the more priority it is given when downloading a package. You may want to edit the file accordingly, and move the geographically closest mirrors to the top of the list, although other criteria should be taken into account.

This file will later be copied to the new system by pacstrap, so it is worth getting right.

Reboot

Optionally manually unmount all the partitions with umount -R /mnt: this allows noticing any "busy" partitions, and finding the cause with fuser(1).

Finally, restart the machine by typing reboot: any partitions still mounted will be automatically unmounted by systemd. Remember to remove the installation media and then login into the new system with the root account.

We did not login to the root account because we had already created the user and had the login manager enabled. Basically, we had already accomplished the post-install tasks and so we were pretty much finished when it came time to reboot. ….Accept for the fact that we needed the ATI video driver and firmware for the BCM4321 wifi interface.

This probably should be in a separate article but...

.... Dennis had a problem with removable media in xfce. The normal behavior is for an iconto pop up on the desktop which was not happening for him. There are also optoins in xfcesettings to auto mount and display contents of the removable drive in a file manager widowthat will automatically pop up on the screen. That didn't happen for him either. ..... I've seen this before and the work-around I use is to install spacefm. spacefm is a AURpackage. Here are instructions for installing AUR packages.